STAN & OLLIE

I finally saw this—it’s taken long enough, as I’m a big fan of the Boys, but there were only two theaters in Boston playing it for a while, and it finally moved to one closer to me.

I’m not sure if I liked it or not. The beginning and end were very good—the end actually had the audience in the theater clapping, a nice sign—and the performances were fantastic, as everyone’s saying. But the middle has this fervent, very modern desire to demythologize them and their friendship, to the extent that it rewrites history to do it.

Of course, I didn’t expect it to be perfectly accurate to their lives, but the writer’s goal is so mind-numbingly obvious here: we’re doing The Sunshine Boys, which, needless to say, is just not who or how Stan and Babe were. The biggest example is that in counterfactually keeping Stanley bitter and resentful about Zenobia, the script neglects the fact that Stan and Babe worked together for eight pictures for Fox and MGM, long after Zenobia! Or how about all of Babe’s other film appearances, including as John Wayne’s sidekick in The Fighting Kentuckian? How about Atoll K?

None of this would be so bad if the obvious reason weren’t this horrible extended sequence in the middle of the movie in which Laurel and Hardy yell and curse at each other. They might not have been saints (who is?), but they were friends, not resentful partners thrown together by fate, as the film portrays them (and then walks back on for the ending). It’s one sequence, admittedly, but it’s so bad and tonally off that it threatened to derail the film altogether.

The picture also comes off as slight; as Jep Gambardella notes, it’s such a straightforward biopic that it’s missing something, a je ne sais quoi that makes it stand on its own as a good movie. Heart, yeah. It’s missing heart, somehow, until those last few minutes, beginning with that wonderful scene when they come off the boat in Ireland (which actually happened, by the way).

It’s annoying, this movie. So much of it is so good, but it never fulfills its potential, and it makes that tragic mistake halfway through. (It’s also so predictable as to be insulting to the viewer’s intelligence.) Yet the performances are so good, and its heart is (that one sequence notwithstanding) so much in the right place, that I didn’t dislike it either. But I also didn’t love it.